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Ben Rayner’s Reasons to Live for Jan. 19

I don’t know what Kim Mitchell’s up to these days, but I remain a wild party.

Esben and the Witch, Wash the Sins Not Only the Face (Matador/Beggars). If Reasons to Live has a fatal flaw, it’s probably a weakness for beguiling Goth-girl frontwomen. Nevertheless, even this easy mark was forced to concede upon initial exposure to Brighton-bred trio Esben and the Witch at Wrongbar during the 2011 Canadian Music Week that its doomy ululations often amounted to a lot of hair-raising, pseudo-tribal caterwauling in search of a tune. Wash the Sins Not Only the Face proffers much in the way of redress for those early criticisms, however, even if comely singer Rachel Davies et al.’s elegantly despondent theatrics still tend to function better moment-to-moment as engulfing, woe-to-it-all sensations than they do as songs that stick around after the respective moments of crisis they gaudily depict have passed. This is an album with poise, drama and sumptuous sonic depth to spare, and an album indeed best absorbed as an album — as one continuous ebb-and-flow of perpetually fraught, Plath-esque emotional torment. There’s some deliberate swanning and swooning about to be navigated on the top end, but if you appreciate Disintegration or Dead Can Dance or Bat for Lashes and the like and you’re patient with the songs they do eventually open out in unlikely and rewarding directions. By the time “Deathwaltz,” “Yellow Wood” and the tingly “Despair” roll around at the midpoint in a rush of sustained New Wave rhythmic muscle, anyway, Wash the Sins … has lured you in completely. It has begun, as they say, to take you on a journey. “The Fall of Glorieta Mountain” cops the xx’s sighing shtick a bit obviously, maybe, but closer “Smashed to Pieces in the Still of the Night” is full-on crushing and rather difficult to deny. A goodie.

2. Ty Segall, Twins (Drag City). Ty Segall returns to Toronto on Feb. 6 at the Phoenix, upsizing considerably (although not at all surprisingly) from his last, memorably unhinged local performance opening for Thee Oh Sees before an equally memorably unhinged crowd at the Hoxton in late September. If your tastes run to wild-‘n’-woolly, primitivist rock ‘n’ roll of the “garage” bent and you’re somehow still not aware of this pathologically prolific 25-year-old’s existence, you should probably avail yourself of “You’re the Doctor” right now for a quick, thrilling insta-fix and then get out to see him play; the San Francisco prodigy is hitting his stride right now and churning forward at such a frightening rate that a spectacular premature flame-out at some point in the near future seems a distinct possibility. Twins was the last and best of the three albums Segall made last year, marking an all-out plunge into amped-up acid-rock traditions established by Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Who and Neil Young circa Rust Never Sleeps that’s nevertheless far too thick-trunked and “meta”-cocky to be mistaken for anything but 21st-century product. It’ll remind you of a bunch of stuff you already love — “Ghost” and “There Is No Tomorrow” heavy up the gnarlier bits of the Beatles’ White Album, for instance, while “Would You Be My Love” could pass for the Jesus and Mary Chain with some faith left in humanity and “Love Fuzz” sounds like Thee Oh Sees taking a crack at Queens of the Stone Age’s “Walkin’ on the Sidewalks” — but Segall clearly loves that stuff, too, and throws it all back at you with contagiously frantic enthusiasm.

3. The Scenics, Dead Man Walks Down Bayview (Dream Tower). First-wave Toronto punks the Scenics have expanded their recording catalogue at a glacial pace, releasing just the 1979 LP Underneath the Door during an initial run that ended in 1982 and then waiting until 2008 and 2009, respectively, to plunder the vaults with How Does it Feel to Be Loved: The Scenics Play the Velvet Underground and odds-‘n’-sods collection Sunshine World. The positive response to those collections convinced the quartet to reunite and play a few shows, which all involved rather enjoyed doing, and now, lo and behold, we have a second Scenics album a full 33 years on from the first. The band’s demeanour has calmed somewhat over the past three decades — how could it not? — but Dead Man Walks Down Bayview finds the Scenics’ caustic wit, scattershot musical tastes and flair for experimentation intact. There’s a touch of rockabilly and a touch of country stirred in with the usual Velveteen jangle and sidewinding New Wave, while the real fun happens when intricately duelling guitarists/vocalists Andy Meyers and Ken Badger let it all sprawl out in rambling, Television-damaged drone-rockers like “When You Come Around” and the swaggering “O Boy.” There’s something to be said for keeping quiet until you’ve got something to say.

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